I am founder of 7wire Ventures, an investment firm that creates new businesses and invests in early and growth stage companies. I was previously the chief executive of Chicago-based Allscripts, the leading provider of electronic health records and other technologies. A serial entrepreneur who previously led two other publicly-traded companies, I graduated from Bucknell University and worked in Washington before accepting a fellowship to study social anthropology at Oxford University. In addition to my work at Allscripts, I founded a fast-growing solar energy company and holds investments in a number of entrepreneurial ventures. A strong proponent of “giving back,” I serve on the International Board of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF). The foundation contributes to both educational and inner-city diversity programs as well as many other charities.

Get The Health Care Industry To Innovate: Force It To Listen To Your Employees

A period photo of an assembly worker at a Long Beach, Calif., aircraft company. (Photo credit: The Library of Congress)

I’ve recently written that if you’re a boss, it makes sense to have some practical discussions with your employees about health insurance—especially if you plan to throw them into an insurance pool.

Actually, I’m excited about putting millions of well-informed consumers into insurance pools. People ask me a lot these days to share my thoughts on Obamacare. They focus on distractions like whether it will be repealed (won’t happen, and most businesses, especially big ones, surprisingly, don’t want repeal) or will people sign up (millions are, so many it outstripped capacity) and finally, what about the software?

Developed by private companies, yes, Obamacare could have been better. And it needs fixing. The real issue people should focus on, however, is the impact the big insurance pools will have on the overall industry. The states where most people live have the pools up and open. Meanwhile the private sector has been busy building giant insurance pools that aren’t available to the public at large. The fact is, many businesspeople like the idea of these big insurance pools, even if some bosses are opting to put their employees into the private ones or, as a number of companies announced earlier this week, begin “bundled buying” directly from insurance providers.

Whatever your view of government’s role in creating these pools, they’re powerful. That power derives not from the government or big industry but from the big groups of health consumers in them. Ordinary people will get to choose what kind of health plans they want. They’ll reject insurance plans that are unappealing. And as the health insurance industry and the health care system overall gets this feedback, we’ll see something we haven’t seen often enough in health care: a focus on serving this new health consumer and lots of innovative ways to do so.

I emphasized this in an appearance on CNBC earlier this week. What I didn’t get a chance to add on TV is that this feedback loop becomes more compelling if the consumers in the pool are more knowledgeable (aka intelligent connected health consumers). Potentially, that’s where leaders at companies, large and small, will have some real impact.

If you want to influence the insurance and health care industry’s innovation and cost curves, here’s a way to have an outsized say in the process: Share your thoughts and advice and knowledge with your employees. Offer them access to health care articles and tools that you think are important and give them time to study their options. The more educated they are, the better decisions they will make. Then, as they start picking plans and products for themselves based on your advice, you’ll be getting the change we brag about in the tech sector: higher quality and lower costs.

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